Activity

They had dinner at a small, upscale pizzeria down the road. You could tell it had been an ordinary pizza shop once, with the linoleum tabletops, until the rich people started going crazy, or sort of crazy, and arriving at the sanatorium nearby. Therefore Sam was confident, given the pizzeria’s usua…

And as I had to go to these places fairly often, mostly by myself, there were conversations, flirtations, with women. I accepted them, as I accepted all those e-mails, as part of the largesse of the late Clinton years. And one night in New York I stepped out into a hallway—I would have liked to say…

[...] The administration had conceded a great deal to the Right, but I knew that Lauren’s father would take it all back, if only he knew how many of us there were, there are, who were with him; if only, as I had sometimes felt with Lauren, he could convincingly be reassured. And as I began to subm…

As I began to expound on this, I thought I saw her looking at me in a way I hadn’t seen a woman look at me in a long time. Probably she wasn’t, or she was just startled by all the words, but already in my mind, in my loins, I sensed a looming ethical dilemma. And I took a deep breath, a pause, beca…

Lauren began to come by in the evenings, and often she was drunk. Are the rich very different from you and me? Judge for yourself. She was drunk, and it was my role to sit in the room I shared with Ferdinand and try to work on my junior paper. “It’s important that you do this,” Ferdinand told me. “…